What is the Digital Certainty Index® (DCI®)?

The Digital Certainty Index® (DCI®) is a measure of the quality and potential impact of a site's digital presence, including:

• A website’s accessibility and usability
• A website’s credibility and trustworthiness
• How well-poised a website is to respond to SEO challenges

The DCI Score is calculated based on a website's performance across three categories: Quality Assurance, SEO, and Accessibility. Each module makes up one third (33.33%) of the Overall DCI Score.

Scores in the Quality Assurance, SEO and Accessibility modules contribute to the overall DCI Score. A DCI Score of 100 means your website is in excellent condition. The DCI Score gives you a comprehensive overview of issues across all aforementioned modules, highlighting issues that need to be fixed and providing recommendations on how to fix them.

DCI Scores

The sub-scores that contribute to the overall DCI Score are:

Quality Assurance Score: This score reflects a website’s credibility and trustworthiness regarding its user-facing characteristics. Your website's Quality Assurance Score is determined by its performance in four subcategories: Content Quality, Content Freshness, User Experience, and Security.
Learn more about the Quality Assurance Score.

SEO Score: This score is a measure of how well the user-facing and technical aspects of a site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately, higher rankings and organic traffic. Your website's final SEO Score is determined by its performance in the four sub-categories: Technical, Content, User Experience, and Mobile. Learn more about the SEO Score.

Accessibility Score: This score is a measure of how well a website tests against web accessibility standards set out in WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1. Your website's Accessibility Score is determined by the number of success criteria a site fulfills under the three WCAG conformance levels (A, AA, AAA), along with performance in the categories WAI-ARIA authoring practices and Best practices. Learn more about the Accessibility Score.

DCI Overview

The DCI Overview can be is found within the Digital Certainty Index section on the main left-hand menu. The Overview tab gives the DCI score details along with a progress graph for the selected site. You are also presented with the issues that need to be addressed to improve the score.

The My Sites sub-menu shows the average DCI score for all your sites. It also shows the average QA Score, Accessibility Score and SEO Score for all sites. A graph shows your progress in each DCI area. The graph allows you to select the scores you are interested in and compare scores over time. A table is also shown giving details of the scores for each individual site.

See also the related article "How are the colors in the DCI score determined?"

Note: The Digital Certainty Index® (DCI®) is patented.